release date: May 3, 2009
format: digital (10 x File, FLAC)
[album rate: 3 / 5] [3,08]
producer: Jon Hopkins
label: Domino - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 2. "Vessel" - 3. "Insides" - 4. "Wire" - 5. "Colour Eye" - 9. "A Drifting Up"
3rd studio album by Jon Hopkins following five years after Contact Note (Aug. 2004) is his first album after signing with Domino Recording Co.
The album also includes the track "Light Through the Veins", which had been issued on the Coldplay album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (Jun. 2008). Hopkins also co-produced the Coldplay song "Life in Technicolor" and from hereon he was an often used co-producer and / or mixer used by the band, who also began touring with Hopkins. Before meeting with Coldplay, Hopkins had made some collaboration works with Brian Eno, who had come heard Contact Note.
Insides is mostly experimental electronica in the styles of IDM, micro and ambient downtempo, and if you happen to be familiar with his acclaimed Immunity from 2013, then this comes out as more of experimental drafts that paved a way to his more original sound later on. The album doesn't appear the same coherent whole you'll find his later albums do. It's more like single tracks pointing in many directions. Some compositions have a synthpop quality that makes you understand the idea of collaborating with Coldplay much more sensible, and others are much more in a classic electronic / Brian Eno territory.
Insides is mostly interesting as Hopkin's formative journey toward more acclaimed works and mostly fails on several parameters, which isn't the same as all bad.
